Series
Action Influences Thought and Not The Other Way Around.
Most self help books sell you the same idea in different packaging: fix your mind first, then your life will follow. cultivate the right thoughts. visualize the outcome. build the belief before you build anything else.
Indeed there is truth in that, thoughts do shape action, I agree. but there is a half of the equation that nobody talks about, the feedback running in the other direction. action shapes thought. and it does, faster, and more permanently, than thinking ever could.
Why I am writing in English and not Arabic.
There is a guilt that comes with it. shame on me for writing in English while being Arab by mother and father. I have never fled to a western or European country. I was not obsessed with western movies, in fact I barely watch movies at all. I accidentally watched two movies in the past two years and that was it. yet I am still influenced by the west. that is simply the reality of the world we live in today. influence no longer requires migration. it travels through knowledge, through the internet, through science, through code.
Reproducibility is the corner stone of science
Somewhere between building a model and publishing the results, something gets lost. not the results themselves, those make it into the paper. what gets lost is everything that would allow someone else to arrive at the same place.
This is the reproducibility problem in machine learning, and it is more widespread than most people admit.
In 2016, the journal Nature reported that around 70% of researchers had failed to reproduce another researcher’s results , and 50% had failed to reproduce their own. machine learning is no exception. a study that analyzed 400 papers from top AI conferences found that only 6% shared code, roughly 33% shared test data, and 54% shared nothing more than a pseudocode summary of their algorithm. not the environment. not the hyperparameters. not the exact version of the library that made it work. just a rough sketch of the idea.
The art must have a purpose other than itself, or it collapses into infinite recursion.
I’ve spent a lot of time confused about my own wiring. not in a debilitating way, more like an ongoing low grade puzzle that I kept returning to. the confusion had a specific shape: I knew I was deeply analytical, the kind of person who could sit with an idea for hours without needing it to go anywhere, who would trace a concept back to its roots just for the satisfaction of understanding it fully. but I also noticed I was restless whenever nothing was being made. not bored exactly. more like something in me would protest, ask what all this thinking was actually for.
This is part of a series of notes I’m taking to understand the person I am when learning something. most of them are about understanding myself and applying useful techniques.
Reading about neuroscience can help me save time instead of experimenting blindly and trying to see what works. and I plan to study neuroscience some day, but as for now I want to share what I’ve learned by myself, as I spent the first 19 years of my life learning how to learn. I never even signed up for the famous Coursera course on this topic. the road of learnign was lonely, paved with faliure moods, it was an experimentation based road.
I call this problem floating information. It is a literal translation of the Arabic word “طائفة”, which means floating in space without connection. I first noticed that there is information that is not linked to anything. it has no context, it solves no problem, and this kind of information is the hardest to keep in my mind. I forget it very easily.